Articles about disasters & nature across every continent and era, oldest first.
At Jwalapuram in Andhra Pradesh, Middle Paleolithic tools lie under and over the 74,000-year Toba ash. Papers from 2007 to 2025 argue what the eruption did
· 72,000 BCA Bronze Age town on Thera with three-story houses and drains, emptied before the eruption buried it. Radiocarbon and Egyptian dates differ by a century.
· 1600 BCVesuvius buried Pompeii under about 4 m of ash in AD 79. Pliny dates it to August 24; Pompeii's park says the October date has no documentary basis.
· AD 79A 1976 bulldozer cut into Joya de Cerén, a Maya village buried by Loma Caldera ash about AD 630-650. Digs found stocked houses, fields and no bodies.
· AD 630Southern Maya cities stopped dating monuments by AD 998. Lake cores, a stalagmite, Aguateca's walls and lidar each explain part of why they emptied.
· AD 900In autumn 2011 a Ryukyu University team found a Yuan warship's keel off Takashima, 23 to 25 meters down. A second hull followed in 2014.
· 1281Peru's Ministry of Culture called Chan Chan a masterpiece of pre-Columbian design in 2016, the year Huaca Toledo was excavated and rain closed the site.
· 1300Tarawera's Kaharoa ash, dated to about AD 1314, holds rat-gnawed seeds. Rat bones, lake charcoal and a 2022 study date the first settlers decades earlier.
· 1314Ancient DNA from graves dated 1338 near Lake Issyk-Kul, in what is now Kyrgyzstan, put the Black Death's source strain at the root of the plague family tree.
· 1347The Vasa Museum says the warship foundered minutes into its 1628 voyage. The inquest found no one guilty; Franzén found the wreck in 1956, raised in 1961.
· 1628Pelsaert's journal records the Batavia's grounding on Morning Reef in 1629, the mutiny that followed, its trial, and the wreck's 1963 rediscovery.
· 1629The London Gazette no. 85 dated the fire to 1 a.m. on September 2, 1666, in Pudding Lane. An Act of 1666 set a yearly fast and ordered a pillar.
· 1666Mount Fuji erupted from a new southeast vent on December 16, 1707, for 16 days. Ash buried Subashiri and fell on Edo; a levy and floods followed.
· 1707How many died in Lisbon on November 1, 1755? Pombal told his governors 6,000 to 8,000; NOAA lists 50,000, then 60,000 to 100,000. No register was kept.
· 1755Hannah Dawes Newcomb kept a parlor fire in Keene from May 1816. Tambora is the accepted cause; a 2016 paper testing the link was withdrawn.
· 1816Carrington and Hodgson each saw a white-light flare on September 1, 1859, as Kew's magnetographs jumped. Auroras and telegraph failures followed.
· 1859William Brahe left the Cooper Creek depot nine hours before Burke, Wills and King returned on April 21, 1861; a royal commission later divided the blame.
· 1861The House of Lords put six death estimates for the 1876-1878 Indian famine on record, from 600,000 to 6 million, and debated Temple's relief wage.
· 1877Historic Environment Scotland records the Tay Bridge high girders falling on December 28, 1879. The 1880 inquiry split into a joint report and Rothery's own.
· 1879Mount Tarawera erupted for about five hours on June 10, 1886 and buried Te Wairoa. A lake survey and a land survey disagree on where the terraces lie.
· 1886Rinderpest reached Africa with the Italian invasion of Eritrea in 1889, killed 90 to 95 percent of cattle by 1896, and was declared eradicated worldwide in 2011.
· 1889The South Fork Dam failed on May 31, 1889. A county commission blamed its owners, a club of Pittsburgh industrialists, but every suit against the club failed.
· 1889Waldemar Haffkine injected himself with 10 cc of plague vaccine on January 10, 1897, in Bombay. A 1902 accident at Mulkowal cost him his post until 1907.
· 1897Mount Pelée destroyed Saint-Pierre, Martinique, on May 8, 1902, three days before an election. Two people in the city are known to have survived.
· 1902
